Asymptomatic

Forty-plus years of rolling dice teaches you a few things. Chief among them: the game’s scaffolding—your basic five-room dungeon, your tavern-to-adventure pipeline—works because it’s reliable. But reliability can calcify into routine, and routine can drain the magic from even the most magical of games.

After running my homebrew Port Haven campaign for three years with the same core group, I found myself wrestling with two familiar DM problems: how to give individual characters meaningful spotlight time without boring the other players, and how to elegantly convey complex plot information that had become tangled over years of play. Rather than reach for conventional solutions, I decided to experiment with the fundamental structure of how we play.